Week two of our Global Immersion Experience 2013, as part of our MBA program at Sauder Business School, entailed that we work with students from Copenhagen Business School to resolve cases provided by local Danish businesses. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to work with students from a different culture and also partner with Danish firms to gain better insight into the Danish work culture.

One of the first things that stood out when cases and companies were being assigned to various groups, was that all save one company were relatively young start-ups with very enthusiastic management teams. This, again, took me back to an initial observation that entrepreneurial spirit was high in Denmark and looked upon with respect, rather than scepticism. This is even more interesting in light of the fact that such encouragement and acceptance of young entrepreneurship, while common in Scandinavia, is not so prevalent throughout the rest of Europe. The case I worked on, involved developing a market entry strategy for a popular Danish start-up into Germany. The cultural differences despite the geographical proximity were quite significant; what worked in Scandinavia, would not work in Germany. This led me to ponder over the fragmented nature of the European market versus the more consolidated preferences in North America. To successfully capture the European market, an organization would have to devise many different strategies addressing the preferences of many unique countries with different languages and cultures. Given the size and homogeneity of the North American market, it just seems that it is much easier to cater to, and could prove more profitable. But that’s just a thought.

Working with the Danish students was a wonderful experience. We had different methods of approaching cases and they were as eager to learn from us as we were from them. They focused on the use strategic tools and issue identification whereas we placed greater emphasis on developing well thought-out recommendations and implementation plans. There was definitely greater emphasis on organizing our thoughts into various frameworks, which was something the Danish students were more used to doing, and it helped us create a more solid basis for our analysis. Combining both approaches led to a more detailed and structured development plan.

As a group, we meshed well together and agreed on restricting work time to regular working hours, allowing us to socialize in the evening. This was already part of the Danish culture, and we gladly embraced the ‘work hard and work on time’ approach. The final presentations themselves were extremely well done, with both Sauder and CBS students doing remarkably well. I did, however, expect the Danish students to be more familiar with various presentation software or just know more about making high impact slides, since the concept of Danish Design was an overwhelming part of our experience in Copenhagen and was looking forward to learning from them. That was not the case and the CBS students were more accustomed to typical power point formats.

Overall, it was brilliant working with such a smart group of people from a completely different part of the world that I had not previously been exposed to. The Danish familiarity with the English language made interaction much easier and also implied a greater degree of exposure to English culture which helped us connect better with our Danish counterparts. My next challenge in evolving my level of inter-cultural fluency is to immerse myself in a culture that does not strongly rely on English as a mode of communication!